The Graphics Stack, Requirements For Ubuntu 11.10

If you're thinking about trying out the Ubuntu 11.10 Beta release
later in the week or are beginning to wonder about what the graphics driver options
for Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" when released in October, here's a
collection of information you'll want to know about the graphics drivers to be
found in Ubuntu 11.10.

There's still more than a month until the release of Ubuntu 11.10
(it's planned for 13 October), but being past the feature freeze and the packages
providing the graphics support are critical to the Linux desktop, they shouldn't
change much between now and October.

The Linux
3.1 kernel isn't making it out for a few more weeks and just before the final
release, so Canonical is playing it safe and sticking to the Linux 3.0 kernel
although the still-in-development release does provide some nice improvements
to the DRM graphics drivers and other areas of the kernel. Users can manually
upgrade to the Linux 3.1 kernel and it should be relatively safe.

Over Mesa 7.10.2, which shipped in Ubuntu 11.04, the
Mesa 7.11 release has many improvements. See the linked article for full details,
but there's support for new OpenGL extensions, there's slowly more of OpenGL 3.0,
more mature Intel Sandy Bridge support, initial Intel Ivy Bridge support, new
AMD hardware support, GLSL compiler improvements, Gallium3D enhancements, better
Nouveau driver support, and many bug-fixes. Ubuntu is not shipping Mesa
with floating-point textures for obvious legal concerns.

The xorg-server package in Ubuntu Oneiric has not received a major
upgrade. X.Org Server 1.10 was also the release used in Ubuntu 11.04. There is
now X.Org
Server 1.11 that carries a lot of bug-fixes, and not much in the way of introducing
major features, but it was decided early by Canonical they did not want to follow
xorg-server 1.11. The 1.11 release does not merge some of the input work they
have been tackling and they wanted to play it safer in case AMD (or NVIDIA) was
slow again in supporting the ABI used by the new xorg-server release.